[Breaking Taps] has a look at “parkerization” — a process to coat steel to prevent rust. While you commonly see this finish in firearms, it is usable anywhere you need some protection for steel parts. The process is relatively easy. It does require heat and a special manganese solution made for the purpose. You scuff […]
While plastics are very useful on their own, they can be much stronger when reinforced and mixed with a range of fibers. Not surprisingly, this includes the thermoplastic polymers which are commonly used with FDM 3D printing, such as polylactic acid (PLA) and polyamide (PA, also known as nylon). Although the most well-known fibers used […]
There was a time when building a telescope was a rite of passage for budding astronomers, much as building a radio was the coming age for electronics folks. These days, many things are cheaper to buy than build, even though we do enjoy building anything we can. Orion was a big name in telescopes for […]
Hackaday readers are likely the kind of folks that have a favorite keyboard, so you can probably imagine how devastating it would be to find out that the board you’ve sworn by for years is going out of production. Even worse, the board has some internal gremlins that show up after a few years of […]
It is hard to imagine what a mainframe or supercomputer can do when we all have what amounts to supercomputers on our desks. But if you look at something like IBM’s mainframe Telum chip, you’ll get some ideas. The Telum II has “only” eight cores, but they run at 5.5 GHz. Unimpressed? It also has […]
OK, sit down, everyone — we don’t want you falling over and hurting yourself when you learn the news that actually yes, your phone has been listening to your conversations all along. Shocking, we know, but that certainly seems to be what an outfit called Cox Media Group (CMG) does with its “Active Listening” software, […]
[Michelle Hampson] reports in IEEE Spectrum that Chinese researchers may improve self-driving cars by mimicking how the human eye works. In some autonomous cars, two cameras use polarizing filters to help understand details about what the car sees. However, these filters can penalize the car’s vision in low light conditions. Humans, however, have excellent vision […]
Recently, [Richard Audette] bought an Akaso EK7000 action camera for his daughter’s no-smartphones-allowed summer camp, which meant that after his daughter returned from said camp, he was free to tinker with this new toy. Although he was not interested in peeling open the camera to ogle its innards, [Richard] was very much into using the […]
One way to keep things tiny is to make a system with cartridges where the brain lives on each cartridge instead of the platform itself. [Michael]’s Epic Minimalist Entertainment System (EMES) is one of those, and boy, is it tiny. EMES makes use of the ATtiny10, and they don’t get much AT-tinier than that. This […]